It's no secret that the Internet has changed the news business forever. While some outlets, like The New York Times, struggle to find a way to adapt their business model to the Web, others that were born in the new era are thriving. Demand Media, which employs freelancers to write and produce down-and-dirty articles based on trending keywords, is a huge success. This graphic shows why.
The idea of chasing hot trends of the Web is certainly as old as the Web itself, though Demand Media has distilled it to a science. At the core of the strategy is the company's algorithm (summarized below), which magically pumps out words that barely paid freelancers turn into headlines, and later copy. The result is a media empire that gets double the traffic of the Times' Web site, and it's growing.
Demand Media is fresh off an IPO that netted the company $151 million. But it's doubtful Demand's freelancers will see an increase in their rates. Instead, the company will probably spend some of that cash figuring out its next move in its arms race with Google, which recently began working to reduce the prominence of "content farms" like Demand in its search results.
Part of Demand's strategy is sheer scale. According to the graphic, Demand Media has a goal to publish 1 million articles a month, which is the equivalent of 18 years of the New York Times. That's every article, from every day, of a major daily newspaper from 1993 until now, all published in a single month.
The Times' counterstrategy could be to simply wait for Demand Media to run out of subjects.
[Source: OnlineMBA.com]